International Centre for Studies in Citizenship, Democratic Participation and Civil Society at the Department of Society and Globalisation, Roskilde University organizes during the Academic Year 2008 – 2009 a Lecture Series on Citizenship, Participation and Civil Society.

Abstract

Volunteering can sometimes be viewed as a rather isolated or psychological act.  Otherwise excellent studies of volunteering by sociologists, such as Mark Musick and John Wilson's Volunteers: A Social Profile (2007), sometimes view volunteers as reacting to various motivational characteristics. Sometimes researchers find the causes of volunteering too diverse to explain.  This talk intends to present a more group-oriented approach to volunteering.  It is not entirely new, as it relies on a rather old and forgotten approach to public opinion in sociology that was called the Columbia School (Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Katz).  It has been somewhat revived by political scientists such as Mutz, Huckfeldt and Sprague studying political participation.  It takes off from the sometimes inexplicable answer to "why did you volunteer?" -- "because I was asked."

Its premises are that people are organized into social networks and sometimes into groups.  There are at least three levels.  First, the members of one's social networks are not equal in their motivations to do various things.  There are informal leaders who are more prone to volunteer, make people interested in volunteering or guilty about not volunteering, and who actively recruit (sometimes in subtle ways) and organize volunteers.  These informal leaders do other things like keep us informed on various voluntary projects (religious, union, political party, social movement, and other activities), and they informally organize the community and social networks toward action.  There are often multiple voluntary leaders in different areas (sometimes competing).  Second, these social networks are embedded into structures and cultures of civil society.  More specifically, the opportunities and constraints available for volunteering and group action are structured in different ways in different societies.  And third, it is nurtured or negated over time by generations.  As a result, an approach to studying volunteering should include social network analysis in which some people become informal leaders or instigators, and others become episodic followers, recruits or activists. Thus, volunteering should be viewed much like politics or social movements -- even the most mundane or seemingly isolated volunteering is organized.

About the lecturer

Professor Thomas Janoski has a Ph.D. in sociology of Berkeley in 1986 working with Harold Wilensky and the late Reinhard Bendix. He works at the intersection of work and politics with what can be called a left Weberian approach to political economy. The dissertation was published as "The Political Economy of Unemployment: Active Labor market Policy in West Germany and the United States" in 1990 with the University of California Press. It won the "Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship" award of the political sociology section of the ASA. Other books include "Citizenship and Civil Society: A Framework of Rights and Obligations in Liberal, Traditional, and Social Democratic Regimes" (1998, Cambridge University Press), and "The Comparative Political Economy of the Welfare State (co-edited 1994 with Alexander Hicks and also published by Cambridge). Janoski is currently working on an NSF project and manuscript entitled "Strangers into Citizens: A Comparative/Historical Analysis of Naturalization Processes in 18 Countries," and is co-editor of "A Handbook of Political Sociology" with Alexander Hicks, Mildred Schwartz and Robert Alford. He has been a post-doctoral fellow at Michigan State University, served on the faculty of Duke University for nine years, and have been at the University of Kentucky for the last seven years.